Inside Obama’s Data Machine

In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obamaâ€™s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney â€” and Obama.

So as they did with all the other data collected, stored and analyzed in the two-year drive for re-election, Obamaâ€™s top campaign aides decided to put this insight to use. They sought out an East Coast celebrity who had similar appeal among the same demographic, aiming to replicate the millions of dollars produced by the Clooney contest. â€œWe were blessed with an overflowing menu of options, but we chose Sarah Jessica Parker,â€ explains a senior campaign adviser. And so the next Dinner with Barack contest was born: a chance to eat at Parkerâ€™s West Village brownstone.

For the general public, there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come from a data-mining discovery about some supporters: affection for contests, small dinners and celebrity. But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. â€œWe are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,â€ he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official â€œchief scientistâ€ for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.

Exactly what that team of dozens of data crunchers was doing, however, was a closely held secret. â€œThey are our nuclear codes,â€ campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt would say when asked about the efforts. Around the office, data-mining experiments were given mysterious code names such as Narwhal and Dreamcatcher. The team even worked at a remove from the rest of the campaign staff, setting up shop in a windowless room at the north end of the vast headquarters office. The â€œscientistsâ€ created regular briefings on their work for the President and top aides in the White Houseâ€™s Roosevelt Room, but public details were in short supply as the campaign guarded what it believed to be its biggest institutional advantage over Mitt Romneyâ€™s campaign: its data.

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This is a weblog about urban issues, technology, & culture published by Jordon Cooper since 2001. You can read about me and the site here and if you are looking for one of my columns in The StarPhoenix, you can find them here.